They are the independent, or semi-independent, post-colonial
states, almost always with civil and elected governments, which have simply managed
to achieve and maintain some political will outside imperial grand strategy.
In the imperial cultures, even amongst critical thinkers, it
is not well understood that post-colonial peoples need strong and independent
states, along with widespread popular participation to defend them. These
states are indispensable for building achievements in participation, education,
health and social security, and in defending those achievements.
The imperial powers have never tried to reshape the
post-colonial peoples "in their own image'. That would be to create
competitors. Great power prefers weak, divided, ethnically fractious groups
with little independent will. In that way their resources, markets and
populations are more easily dominated.
Without discounting the many problems of post-colonial
states, we can safely assume that imperialism is far happier with a divided
Balkans, a fractious
With divided countries the great power has its way; but the
dreams of wider cooperation, pan-Arabism, pan-Africanism and a united Latin
America are crushed. Further, nothing substantial in social capacity can be
built in the absence of strong political will and in the presence of great
power intervention.
In the imperial cultures, liberals, syndicalists and
anarchists poorly recognise this need for strong post-colonial states. They
tend to see all states through the lens of their own: tightly locked into the
imperial network of corporate subsidy, privatisation and war; states "captured'
by the ambitions of giant corporations.
However post-colonial states can be rather different. It required
significant independent political will, for example, back in the 1950s, for the
Arbenz government of Guatemala to undertake agrarian reform and for the
Mossadegh government of Iran to nationalise oil. Similarly, the Allende
government in Chile (1970-73) required substantial independent strength and
popular support to carry out its agrarian reform and nationalisations. Yet neither
these governments nor their states were sufficiently strong to survive imperial
reaction and intervention.
More recently, the governments of
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